AMD has released their new Radeon HD 6800 family, so far comprised of the Radeon HD 6850 and Radeon HD 6870 models. Let’s review the standard Radeon HD 6850 from XFX (HD-685X-ZNFC), which follows the AMD reference design.

The name given by AMD to this new GPU family is misleading. Since 6800 is a number higher than 5800, users may think that the two members of this new family are faster than their counterparts from the Radeon HD 5800 family, namely the Radeon HD 5850 and HD 5870, which is not the case. As you can see in the table below, while members of the 6800 family run at a higher clock rate, they have a lower number of internal processors (shaders). This makes members of the 6800 family to be actually slower – but more affordable – than members of the 5800 family.

To compete with the new 6800 family, NVIDIA has reduced the price of their GPUs. After this price reduction, the new Radeon HD 6850 competes directly with the GeForce GTX 460 with 768 MB. The Radeon HD 5850 is between USD 60 and USD 80 more expensive than the Radeon HD 6850.

Video Card

Core Clock

Shader Clock

Memory Clock (Real)

Memory Clock (Effective)

Memory Interface

Memory Transfer Rate

Memory

Shaders

Price

GeForce GTX 460 (768 MB)

675 MHz

1,350 MHz

900 MHz

3,600 MHz

192-bit

86.4 GB/s

768 GB GDDR5

336

USD 170 – 185

GeForce GTX 460 (1 GB)

675 MHz

1,350 MHz

900 MHz

3,600 MHz

256-bit

115.2 GB/s

1 GB GDDR5

336

USD 220 – 230

GeForce GTX 465

607 MHz

1,215 MHz

801.5 MHz

3,206 MHz

256-bit

102.6 GB/s

1 GB GDDR5

352

USD 220 – 240

Radeon HD 5850

725 MHz

725 MHz

1 GHz

4 GHz

256-bit

128 GB/s

1 GB GDDR5

1,440

USD 250 – 260

Radeon HD 5870

850 MHz

850 MHz

1.2 GHz

4.8 GHz

256-bit

153.6 GB/s

1 GB GDDR5

1,600

USD 330 – 340

Radeon 6850

775 MHz

775 MHz

1 GHz

4 GHz

256-bit

128 GB/s

1 GB GDDR5

960

USD 180 – 190

Radeon 6870

900 MHz

900 MHz

1.05 GHz

4.2 GHz

256-bit

134.4 GB/s

1 GB GDDR5

1,120

USD 240 - 260

Prices were researched at Newegg.com on the day we published this review. All graphics chip listed above are DirectX 11 parts.

XFX also has a factory-overclocked version of this video card, called “Black Edition.” In this card the graphics processor runs at 820 MHz and memory runs at 4.4 GHz.